San Anto co-founder to reign over Huevos Rancheros

Ramos making art again after a four-year break.

Updated 6:02 pm, Thursday, September 29, 2011

Juan Ramos (left) and Maria Antonietta Berriozábal are King and Queen Huevo for this year's San Antonio Cultural Arts gala. COURTESY CHRIS SAUCEDO

Juan Ramos (left) and Maria Antonietta Berriozábal are King and Queen Huevo for this year's San Antonio Cultural Arts gala. COURTESY CHRIS SAUCEDO

San Anto co-founder to reign over Huevos Rancheros

1 / 1

Back to Gallery

The memory of San Anto Cultural Arts' inaugural Huevos Rancheros Gala is still fresh in Juan Miguel Ramos' mind.

The artist and musician, who co-founded the West Side arts organization with Manuel Castillo and Cruz Ortiz, recalls the eager crowd that awaited the low-rider procession carrying the first gala's royal couple in the parking lot of the now-defunct Karam's Restaurant.

“When we saw all the people there, it just hit me like, wow, this was this little mural project that Manny, Cruz and I started three years before,” Ramos says. “That was really special to realize.”

Fourteen years later, Ramos is donning the feathered mantle of King Huevo as one of the honorees of the tongue-in-cheek event originally conceived of as a spoof of highbrow affairs. San Anto's largest fundraiser, the gala is 9 a.m. to noon Saturday at Plaza Guadalupe. It is expected to draw a crowd of about 500 for breakfast, a silent art auction and live music.

Ramos will reign alongside activist and former councilwoman Maria Antonietta Berriozábal who, like Ramos, is being recognized for contributions to the cultural life of the city. It is a tribute he humbly acknowledges as “a big deal to me,” though in a few key respects, today's San Anto is unrecognizable from the organization he helped incubate in a 500-square-foot space on Chihuahua Street.

Most Popular

For starters, there's the new building on El Paso Street, a stone's throw from “Educación,” San Anto's first mural. Then there's the largely new staff.

But most important, there's a new executive director. Recently, Jorge Piña was hired to fill the position the charismatic, goateed Castillo held from San Anto's inception until his death from cancer in 2009.

“It's very much a different thing in that I can't identify it with Manny anymore,” Ramos says. “But I'm also happy the organization is moving forward and doing well and still doing great things for the community.”

It was Ramos' friendship with Castillo, whom he first met through the underground music scene at Taco Land, that kept him linked to the organization responsible for dozens of murals on the West Side, even after he left to pursue music and his art career.

“In our personal lives, we would hang out and were friends, so this was a big part of his life, and I always was impressed with what he was doing,” says Ramos, currently the chairman of the graphics department at the International Academy of Design and Technology. “And so whenever he did ask for help, I was really interested in participating.”

Ramos' Latin rock band, Sexto Sol, for whom he plays drums, performed at most of San Anto's galas, and he has been a regular contributor to the silent art auction throughout the years. In some ways, though, his coronation as King Huevo marks Ramos' re-emergence into the art scene.

Known for creating pieces that combine drawing with photography, Ramos landed an Artpace residency in 2002 and, with work in the permanent collections of the Dallas Museum of Art and the New Museum in New York, had been garnering national attention. But when his son Miguel, now 4, was born, Ramos decided to trade an artist's uncertain payday for a full-time job. Between work and helping raise an infant, he had little time to spare.

“I pretty much quit making new work,” he says.

But Ramos couldn't say no when he got a call in February from his friend Rigo Luna asking him to contribute a piece to a Castillo tribute exhibit he was curating for the Museo Alameda.

“At that point, I felt like I was ready to start making new work again,” he says. “And it was so easy when I hadn't picked up a pencil in four years. I made that drawing in about half an hour. It was a portrait of (Castillo).”

Ramos, who recently turned 40, is working on new drawings, and he is looking forward to working in video again, though as he recently discovered, his old work still has legs. Last year, the San Antonio Museum of Art acquired one of his drawings for its permanent collection, and another of Ramos' works was used as the signature image for “Arte Tejano: De Campos, Barrios y Fronteras,” an exhibit organized by the Smithsonian Latino Center.

“I don't have anything real solid as far as where I'm going to show next, but one of the things my job affords me is the ability to not worry about those things,” he says. “I don't need to make the art for money, so I can just be free to make what I want to make and not be concerned with pleasing a gallerist or collector.”